Overview

Life X 3 by Yasmina Reza

From the celebrated writer of Art, a scathingly hilarious commentary on vanity, professional insecurity, and the vicissitudes of marriage.

Life X 3 presents three versions of two couples (and an offstage six-year-old) trying to make a success of one evening despite the fact that they neither like nor respect one another. When Hubert and Inès arrive a day early to dinner at the home of Henri and Sophie, Sophie barely has time to change out of her robe and Inès is in a foul mood about a run in her stocking  from there, the evening can only go downhill. Over an improvised meal of chocolate fingers, potato chips, and wine, the couples trade insults on every social and professional level and loyalties are changed with the same rapidity that glasses of Sancerre are drained. However, as she has so astutely done in the past, Yasmina Reza uses these acidic exchanges to illuminate the innate desire for love and acceptance in us all.

Yasmina Reza is an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She lives in Paris.

Product Details

About the Author

Yasmina Reza, born in Paris in 1959, is an acclaimed playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. Her first play, Conversations Après un Enterrement (Conversations After a Burial) won her the 1987 Molière Award for Best Author along with a Johnson Foundation Award and a SACD New Talent Award. Her other works for the theater include Art and The Unexpected Man. She lives in Paris.

Editorial Reviews

...elegantly streaked with troubling shadows and shaped with Cartesian symmetry.

NY Times

Yasmina Reza's new play is an elegant enigma...as an intellectual construct, the play is fascinating.

“[Reza] is the most exported living playwright on the planet, a woman whose culturally rich background has given her real insight into the melting pot of today's society . . . Life X 3 ruminate[s] on man's place in the universe . . . Her amalgamation of laughs with smart arguments and flashes of raw emotion is a crowd-pulling recipe . . . [Her] social satire is often cryingly funny.” Kate Bassett, The Independent

“The Grand Chaos Theory . . . is applied to a Parisian dinner-party in Yasmina Reza's delightful . . . comedy of manners. Life X 3 is designed to show how chance, with its impact upon our actions and behaviour, changes everything . . . A wicked pleasure to behold. Miss Reza is a star-reporter at the sex-war front and a thorough mocker of male pretensions.” Nicholas de Jongh, The Evening Standard

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

This is a really good play, well done to Yasmina Reza on this one, I have only seeen this play and another play he wrote called Arts, but this one takes the cake. A play that keeps you on the edge of your swat through out the play..... The only draw back how ever, is it does repat the same night three times, so by the third time, you nearly know the lines as well as the actors